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Two Victories for Academic Freedom
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The Confucius Institutes
Rochelle Peterson
Saving Remnants: Where Western Civ Thrives
Glenn M. Ricketts

ADVANCES
Due Process, DeVos, and the Courts
KCJohnson
Harvard Hoist on Its Own Petard?
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Politicized Science
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Diversity Discontent
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Queer Criminology: New Directions in Academic Irrelevance
M ike Adams

ARTICLES
Object of Inquiry: Psychology's Other (Non-replication) Problem
John Staddon
Academic Freedom and the Central European University
Stephen Baskerville
Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian and Soviet History
Jon K Chang

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The Liberal Arts as Magic and as Paradox
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Poetry by Michael Lurie, David Randall; Reviews by Paul Hollander, Robert Maranto

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� Springer
262
liberal-progressive leftist," writes Green in his critique of gay -and
feminist-dominated AIDS policy. "I have always supported reproductive
rights and sexual freedom, and 1 spent many years working in contraception,
family planning, and condom marketing. 1 am not an active adherent of any sect,
denomination, or religion." Green is appropriately ashamed for this verbal
self-flagellation and admits, "I shouldn't have to say these things, but such is
the level of argument that some people judge one's findings by one's politics and
g
vice versa."
In short, gender studies and related fields have already largely curtailed
academic freedom in Western universities. When Daphne Patai and Noretta
Koertge interviewed academic scholars for their critique of women's studies
programs, "Nearly every woman . . . requested that her name, affiliation and
,,9
other identifying features be disguised.
Sexual radicals today are openly committed to censorship in universities and
claim the authority of all women and other sexual "minorities" to support
silencing others. "More women then [sic] men think universities should safeguard
people of a particular gender, race, or sexuality against offensive views," one
ostensibly moderate feminist columnist writes in the Daily Telegraph. "Students
with privilege . . . have the opportunity to leam . . . that after centuries of being in
charge, it's someone else's turn."
Stepping back to view this in the wider political context, the Hungarian
government, along with that of Poland and other countries in Central Europe
that dissent from the liberal agenda are now being excoriated for threatening the
"rule of law" by the European Union (EU}-an institution so undemocratic that
it does not meet the admissions standards it applies to member countries (and
one that generously funds the CEU).
So perhaps what we are seeing in Central Europe today is an optical illusion.
Perhaps it is the democratically elected Hungarian government that is truly the
protector of academic freedom-and even of freedom generally-and the
plutocratic empires of Soros and the EU that are trying to curtail it.
" the Soviet Union, 1923-1939
Edward Green, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment Has Betrayed the Developing World
(Sausalito, California: PoliPoint Press, 20 II), xviii-xix.
9 East (University of Hawaii Press, 2016);jonntexas@gmail.com.
Patai and Koertge, xxv.
� Springer
s. Baskerville Acad. Quest. (2019) 32:263-270
DOI I0.1007/sI2129-019-09791-8
Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian and Soviet History
Jon K. Chang
Published online: 8 April 2019
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
It should be made clear which of the scholars cited by name in the
exchange write social history. Getty, Rittersporn, Manning, Solomon,
Viola, and Fitzpatrick do not write social history as that term is understood
and applied by historians of Western Europe and America.
-William Chase, The Russian Review, (Oct.l987)
Yet although they [Holquist, Martin, Weiner and others-namely
revisionists] raise the term race, they step around it gingerly and
quickly retreat t o the safer language of ethnicity and [Soviet]
nationality.
l
-Eric D. Weitz, Slavic Review
This essay examines why many of the so-called "social historians" of Russian
and Soviet studies and in the West did not champion the rights of the marginalized
or subaltern nationalities of the Soviet Union, and did not even document their
2
voices and identities. Their views, which were disseminated widely, trivialized
the deportations and high death rates of the various Soviet minorities from the
1930s to the 1950s by siding with the Soviet state and dismissing the persecution
they suffered as being due to their ideology, instead of their ethnicity.
I Eric D. Weitz, "Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Etlmic and
National Purges," Slavic Review 61, no. I (Spring, 2002): 1-29.
W hen I use the term "Eurocentric," I have included the two Christian Caucasian nationalities, the Armenians
2
and Georgians as part of the European peoples. Ty pically both are considered both Caucasian and European
when in Russia and or the former USSR. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action: Nations and Nationalism in
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 127.
Jon K Chang is an American historian and the author of Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far
� Springer
264 Chang
' On Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian History 265

First, let us present some prehistory. From 1930 to the 1950s, Stalin shifted are called "revisionist scholars" because they challenged the previous twentieth

Soviet state policies and Soviet socialism itself towards the promotion of Russians century scholarship that saw the Soviets as a totalitarian adversary of Western

(as well as the Ukrainians and Belarusians) as primus inter pares (first among democracy, and instead took a more benign view, interpreting Soviet history as a

equals) in the USSR. This moved the category of race or nationality to a hierarchical beleaguered but noble experiment in socialism and a possible, if far from ideal,
5
scale. Racial hierarchy had been anathema to socialism which preached that only alternative to the Western capitalist model. Although nominally "social historians,"

socioeconomic classes were unequal. This new classification graded and codified they ignored and rarely interviewed Soviet citizens themselves. As Haynes and

the loyalties (political and cultural) of the various Soviet peoples based on their Klehr wrote, "Under these circumstances, revisionists reinterpreted the limited and

perceived closeness to Russian cultural norms, ethos, practices, and histories. sometimes ambiguous documentary record to present a benign view of Stalinism.

Moving Russians to primus inter pares concurrently necessitated that the They belittled testimony by the ethnic survivors of the Gulag as biased complaints
, 6
diaspora nationalities-Soviet Greeks, Finns, Poles, Germans, Chinese, Koreans, of anticommunists or embittered exiles. ,

Iranians, and others-all with ancestral homelands outside the USSR, become the Second, the "social historians" Suny, Fitzpatrick, and others overwhelmingly

"last among equals" in Soviet socialism until Stalin's death in 1953 and perhaps used the Soviet archives with very little use of oral history despite the fact that

longer. these archives were and are constantly culled or revised. Files were and can still

"Social historians" in the Soviet context, as in the West generally, claim to be be destroyed which do not fit the predominant socio-political narrative(s). Third,

doing "history from below," delving into the lived experiences of ordinary citizens these scholars discounted the blind spot in Soviet studies, especially in their own

below the level of politics. This was the type of history that, at least in theory, monographs and methodologies, which was that the archives of the intelligence

characterized the Sheila Fitzpatrick and Ronald G. Suny-led Soviet studies, history, agencies (including the OGPU, NKVD, KGB, and the now renamed FSB) are

and political science departments at the Universities of Chicago and Michigan not and have never been fully opened to researchers or historians (especially
7
during their periods of tenure and scholarship (Suny and Fitzpatrick respectively). those who do not work for the Russian Federation's FSB).

This was also the approach ofFitzpatrick's former students (Terry Martin, Jonathan The work of Sheila Fitzpatrick is fairly representative of the revisionist

Bone, Peter Holquist, and others) and those with similar theories (Francine Hirsch, scholars in Soviet studies. Fitzpatrick defined herself as a "social historian"
3 researching the subaltern nationalities while uncovering the "view from below,"
Arnir Weiner, and others). All were unwilling to admit that the Soviet Union
carried out ethnic cleansing internally based on racial animus and stereotypes of the versus the more political orientation of the totalitarian school scholars, such as

loyalties and character of the various deported Soviet diaspora peoples. These Leonard Schapiro, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker, who emphasized Cold

scholars effectively handcuffed Soviet studies in the West so that it did not examine War politics and the building of the Soviet Empire. Yet when it came to the

the ethnic chauvinism of Soviet policies, or the broader issue of human rights. Their Soviet diaspora peoples and the "nationalities deportations" from 1937 to 1950,

Western leftist and anti-Cold War attitudes toward the "U.S. military industrial both Suny and Fitzpatrick held that these cases of ethnic cleansing were not

complex" led them to so strongly identifY with Soviet socialism that they discounted racial but ideological in nature, in which both elites and ordinary people could be

the voices and experiences of the Soviet diaspora peoples, mostly by not engaging targeted as "enemies of the people."

them and refusing to put their experiences into the proper context.4 These scholars
S
For a thorough analysis to date of this, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey K1ehr,In Denial: Historians,
Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 17-18 and the bibliographies of most of
3 the monographs named in this essay of the "revisionists." The bibliographies are almost all archival based (even
1999) in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary
Fitzpatrick listed many of her former students (circa
memoirs).
Life in Extraordinary TImes: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix. One, for 6Ibid., 17.
example, was Jonathan Bone. Regarding the Korean deportation, he states, "Neither did the mass relocation For Dr. Jerry Hough (also a revisionist), see Ibid., 17 and Fitzpatrick, Spy, 330-331.
amount to ethnic cleansing, though post-Soviet scholars often assert that it did. It is better characterized as an 7
0leg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale
ethnicized population transfer." See Jonathan Andrew Bone, "Socialism in a Far Country: Stalinist Population University Press, 2004), 2-3; Theodore Karasik, T he Post-Soviet Archives Organization, Access,
Politics and the Making of the Soviet Far East, 1929-1939," PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 2003. and Declassification (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1993), 6; Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire:
4
Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir ofCold War Russia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 309, 340. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 387, fn202,
Page 209 states, "I thought of myself as different from the general run of British and American Soviet scholars, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton:

with their Cold War agenda (as I saw it) of discrediting the Soviet Union rather than understanding it." Page 340 Princeton University Press, 2015), 5 which states, "With the Soviet party and government (but not secret
states, "That was because I was what was called a 'revisionist' in the 1970s; that is, a social historian critical of police) archives opened." OGPU, NKVD and KGB were all abbreviations for the Soviet political police from
the totalitarian model." 1923 to 1991. The three distinct abbreviations represent different reorganizations of the political (secret) police.
� Springer � Springer
266 Chang On Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian History 267

Ronald G. Suny announced he was a Marxist social historian who would specifically about the Crimean Tatar deportation, Weiner stated, "Despite

overcome past prejudices and oversights by focusing on the history of the their horrible suffering (about one-quarter died during their first three years

"non-Russians."s He proclaimed his "liberal, progressive and Marxist influences in exile), it was their territorial identity and not their physical existence or

and leanings" far and wide, especially in his academic autobiography, Red Flag even their distinct ethnic identity that the regime sought to eradicate." 14
9 Weiner's "territorial identity" theory is contrived and proves false upon
Unfurled: History, Historians and the Russian Revolution. However, once
situated at Oberlin College, he proceeded to write in-depth histories only about deeper examination. 15 The Crimean Tatars and Koreans were deported

Russians, Georgians, and Armenians. His own personal research never ven­ separately under separate deportation orders. However, only Tatar and

tured upon the peoples near and east of the Ural mountains, those especially Korean women married to Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks were allowed

marginalized in Russian and Soviet historiography-the Caucasian Muslims, to remain in the Crimea and the Russian Far East (respectively), while

Central Asians, all of the various Tatar peoples, the Siberian natives, other families married to Tatar or Korean men were deported. 16 If the identities

Asian peoples (such as Buriats and Kalmyks), and the various Finno-Ugric were truly "territorially based," all members of the nationality would have to

peoples of the USSR. This is negligent and antithetical to "social history" be deported.

because these latter groups were marginalized to a far greater degree than the Second, a "territorial identity" is one which is easily transmittable

non-(Eastern) Slavic Armenians and Georgians. 10 Regarding the Soviet (more akin to a social identity). This would mean that during the Korean

Koreans, Suny (with Kivelson) on page 304 of their monograph Russias Empires deportation for example, the Soviet state would have needed to deport not

repeated the same findings as Terry Martin's, citing the latter's "Origins" article in only Koreans, but all others who had adopted this "territorial identity" or

its entirety (as the reference for the Soviet Korean case), II explaining that the ethos. The state would have had to deport large numbers of Russians and

Soviet state did not "conceive of these deportations as ethnic .. . It was the Soviet Ukrainians who possessed this regional identity, especially those who

leadership's strong commitment to forming a multinational state, rather than any were neighbors with Koreans.17 This did not occur and was not a part

hostility to ethnic identities, that politicized ethnicity by linking it to the formation of the "nationalities deportations."
2 These Eurocentric "social historians" and their students adopted positions
of administrative territories, land possession, and resettlement."1
Suny and Fitzpatrick (and Jerry Hough) led many scholars in Soviet and which could in fact be called "Russian nationalist" or those expressing

Russian history down a false path. It is clear that the Soviets recognized these Russian populist and nativist sentiments. They absolved the Soviet Union

eastern ethnic groups as "persons and beings of a national language, character of ethnic cleansing through exceedingly long, typically Marxist theoretical

or mentality (psychological makeup), territory and economic life."13A revisionist articles. Primarily, they employed three stratagems of history writing and

historian of a later generation, Arnir Weiner, wrote about the Soviet "nationalities historiography in order to make Soviet "ethnic cleansing" more benign, or

deportations" and tried to explain them away. Weiner argued that the nationalities not ethnic cleansing at all. First, they did not put the "nationalities deportations"

deportations removed ethnic groups because of their "territorial identities." Writing of the Soviet Koreans in their proper historical context, that of the 1936 Stalinist
Soviet Constitution. This is a document that promised individual determinations
"
See Ronald Grigor Suny, "Rethinking Soviet Studies: Bringing the Non-Russians Back [n," in Beyond Soviet
Studies. ed. Daniel Orlovsky (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Press, 1995), 105-134.
of guilt in Soviet courts and that Soviet citizens could not be judged collectively
9 Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History. Historians and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, by their nationality, stipulations that should have effectively prohibited wholesale
IS
2017), 1-16. See also the back cover of Ronald Grigor Suny's Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modem
ethnic cleansing.
History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) which states tbat he is: "A specialist in the history of the
non-Russian peoples of the former Soviet Union."
14
IO Amir Weiner, "Nothing but Certainty," Slavic Review 61, no. I (Spring 2002): 46.
"Most Bolsheviks were Russian, and in 1922, tbey accounted for about 72 percent of party members. Others
IS
wbo were disproportionately Bolshevik were Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, and Latvians. See Amir Weiner, Making SenseD/War: The Second World War and the Fate o/the Bolshevik Revolution
Jews, Georgians. and Armenians were overrepresented in the party leadership, and this remained the case until (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 148 for the second iteration of tbis theory.
1953."See Martin McCauley, The Soviet Union. 1917-1991. 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1993). 112. 16
N.F. Bugai, Ikh Nada Deportirovat: Do/':umenty. Fakty i Komentarii (Moskva: Druzhba Narodov, 1992).45
II and Anatolii Kuzin, Dalnevostochnye Koreitsy: Zhim i tragediia sudby (Uzhno-Sakhalinsk: Dalnevostochoe
Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Russia's Empires (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 304, fn23.
Footnote 23 is written as follows "Martin. 'The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing.' 813-861." knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1993), 164.
12 17
Martin, "Origins," 829. [t seems apropos to call this an "ethos" rather than an identity since the primary factor is territory-geography.
13 I"
Chang, Burnt, 177. Chang, Burnt, 175.

%l Springer %l Springer
268 �hang On Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian History 269

Second, the social historians and revisionists of Russian and Soviet studies homeland? W hat happened to the policy of 'national in form, socialist in
,
decoupled Soviet chauvinism from any connection or continuities with the content?" 22
Tsarist period. For example, Martin states:

Conclusion
By Soviet xenophobia, I mean simply the exaggerated Soviet fear of
foreign influence and foreign contamination. I absolutely do not mean
These revisionist historians took power and gained social capital on various
traditional Russian xenophobia. Soviet xenophobia was ideological,
campuses through leftist liberal credentials yet adopted a Russian nationalist
not ethnic. It was spurred by an ideological hatred and suspicion of foreign
19 point of view which degraded the national minorities of the Soviet Union, their
capitalist governments, not the national hatred of non-Russians.
histories, their contributions, and especially their suffering.23 I contend that
this is a type of gentrified racism; one which has its origins in middle and
The third stratagem was to label this hatred of so-called foreign capitalist
upper-middle class academics in Western liberal democracies with little or
imperialists that arose during the 1930s as "Soviet xenophobia." This was a
no direct-long term lived experiences in communist, totalitarian countries
complete misnomer. The peoples being deported were not foreigners; they
or their post-Soviet incarnations. These academics, whose influence peaked in
were simply Soviet national minorities in a supposedly socialist polity (the
the 1960s and 70s, passed on similar politics to their students. Their logic requires
USSR) who were being deported within the Soviet Union. Likewise for
that one accept as valid a clearly false narrative: elites among Soviet minorities
Martin's "Russian xenophobia." The Russian empire expanded beyond the
were arrested and shot, and their cornmunities deported. However, they were
borders of Kievan Rus through imperialism. As it expanded, Russian
deported not because of their ethnic identities but because of "their political
colonizers and Cossack soldiers sometimes expressed deep antipathies
loyalties, inability to assimilate, and other reasons." These scholars insisted that
and violent actions towards the Finno-Ugric peoples and especially the
the ethnic and racial phenotypes of these Soviet minorities were simply "markers"
Siberian natives. This hardly counts as xenophobia. The Russians and
or "referents" for their putative political loyalties and other deleterious traits.
Cossacks are coming into the territories of others, not the reverse. Martin
Therefore, accordingly, the Soviet state was ideological and never ethnic. 24 This
and other revisionists simply refused to associate racism or chauvinism
is sophistry. No one in academia would dare redefine and then absolve the acts of
with Soviet socialism, and so purposely renamed this as "xenophobia."
genocide and ethnic cleansing which occurred in Hitler's Germany, Pol Pot's
Again, this kind of nomenklatura favored and promoted the Soviet state
Cambodia, or the Hutu's Rwanda. Yet the revisionist account of the "nationalities
and Russian nationalist and nativist sentiments.
deportations" dominates Soviet and Russian studies.
It would be hard for any member of the Soviet diaspora or deported
W hat cannot be denied is that from the 1930s to around 1950, fourteen Soviet
peoples to see these revisionist writings as anything other than a cover for
nationalities were named in NKVD orders, their communities were forcibly
Soviet ethnic and racial bigotry. Revisionist Francine Hirsch wrote about
removed and deported within short, discrete periods of time on charges that
"unextinguished loyalties to homelands and states outside of Soviet
,, named them by ethnicity.
borders, 20 while Terry Martin named "the exaggerated Soviet fear of
Soviet studies and Western diplomacy towards the USSR were handcuffed by
foreign capitalist influence and contamination" as causes for the nationalities
this self-proclaimed progressive revisionism which turned out to be, in fact,
deportations.21 The third scholar, Amir Weiner, identified their "territorial
hard-right Russian nationalist and nativist views towards Soviet ethnic
identities" as the primary culprit. As a Soviet Greek or Korean, one might
cleansing. And yet, these errors in historical thought continue to be taught. Most
answer, "What is going on here? I have never been to Greece or Korea. W hat
of the scholars teaching at the top schools in North America in Russian history,
possible loyalties or territorial attachments or ethos could I have to my ancestral
22
Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (repr. 1935, Honolulu: University Press of
19
Martin, "Origins," 829, 861. the PaCIfic, 2003), 210. Page 210 states, "Proletarian in content and national in form." See also 260-261.
20 23
Francine Hirsch, Empire ofNations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Russian nationalism and Russians (as well "Russianness") as primus inter pares surged beginning in the
Cornell Umverslty Press, 2005), 272, 275, 295. mid-l 930s under Stalin.
2l 24
Martin, "Origins," 829. Chang, Burnt, 174 . See bottom 174 in parentheses.

� Springer � Springer
270 'Chang Acad. Quest. (2019) 32:271-274
DOl 10. 1007/sl 2129-019-09789-2

politics, or literature themselves come from only a small number of schools?S

Scholars who try to bring in different approaches or methodologies are the fIrst
to be dismissed. Groupthink and the concentration of power in just a few hands
have severely limited the fIeld of Russian history and politics which, in tum How Fascism Works: The me from being disappointed by his
inhibits and debilitates U.S. diplomacy, politics, and international relations with Politics of Us and Them, well-intentioned efforts to raise the
Russia and the countries of the former USSR. It hobbles U.S. diplomacy and Jason Stanley, Random House, level of public consciousness about
international relations by putting the U.S. on the defensive even in terms of 2018, XXIX+218 pp., $17.68 Trump's policies.
human rights, as a signifIcant part of Russia's past abuses are wiped clean. It also hardbound. The book could have been both a
puts the burden of proof on the U.S. in substantiating its claims of Russian or devastating critique of "Trumpism"
Soviet-era human rights violations, rather than utilizing and empowering oral and a study of the contemporary
The One Way Street: Misunderstandin
history, fIeldwork, and interviews from former citizens of Communist Bloc FaUm incarnations and remnants of fascism,
regimes and the USSR. and their connection with the ideas
Paul Hollander and policies of Mussolini and Hitler.
Published online: 4 April 2019
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of
Instead we have a collection of
Springer Nature 2019 rather unoriginal, if impassioned,
generalizations and cliches about

This reviewer has to confess that his "fascist politics" and "the politics of

dislike of Pre s i d e n t Trump h a s us and them." These generalizations

predisposed him t o approach with a do not provide a better understanding

favorable disposition each and every of Trump and his supporters, neither

critique of him that he encounters. do they shed new light on fascism and

These sentiments explain my interest its current appeal in many parts of the

in this book. I also share with its author world.

(son of Jewish-German refugees) A no-holds-barred critique of Trump

strong feelings about fascism and and all he stands for does not require

Nazism since I experienced and the endless and tiresome invocation of

survived the Jewish persecution the specter of "fascism" or "fascist

in Hungary during World War II. politics," transforming them into the

These affinities did not prevent all-purpose terms of denigration they

used to be in the Sixties. Then, as

Paul HoUander is professor emeritus of sociology now in this book, "fascist" ceased to
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and mean anything specific or distinctive. It
associate of the Davis Center for Russian and
Eur a s i a n S t u dies at H a r v a r d Uni v e r s i t y , could be a synonym for authoritarian,
Cambridge, MA 02138; phollander32@gmail.com.
nationalist, extremist, repressive,
He is the author or editor of sixteen books, the most
recent being From Benito Mussolini to Hugo intolerant, malevolent, unjust, racist,
Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political xenophobic, ethnocentric-almost
Hero Worship (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2S
To see how Soviet studies is dominated by just a few schools, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Whither Soviet He was among the first supporters of NAS and has anything self-evidently disreputable
History?: Some Reflections on Recent Anglophone Historiography," Region I, no. 2 (2012): 213-230 (see esp. been a member of its advisory board since it was
a n d repugnan t . The book was
213) and David Wolff, "Roundtable: What Is a School? Is There a Fitzpatrick School of Soviet History?" Acta founded. Hollander is also on the Editorial Advisory
Siava Iaponica 24 (2007): 229-241, to name just two articles. Board of Academic Questions. probably organized around this word
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